The future is macaroon

Congratulations to David Cameron.

This is a good result for the party. Not only has there been a period where the party has dominated the news with an open and thoughtful election campaign, but there is a renewed sense of optimism permeating the party. Even the public seem to have sat up and paid attention to what the party is doing - probably the first time since 1992.

What does this mean for politics?

Clearly a revitalised Tory party, just when the Government is going through a period of significant and sustained instability, is going to begin to give people a real vision of an alternative. Labour will have an interesting future and the landscape of the relationship between Blair and Brown will come under renewed pressure. For the Lib Dems this will also be an interesting challenge. David Cameron’s arrival will put very large tanks on Lib Dem lawns in the South. The Lib Dems have done a good job of looking like the Conservative left in places such as Kingston but David Cameron’s approach will appeal to the London urbanites that saw the Lib Dem approach to Social issues as more relevant in a Labour dominated politics. At the last election the Lib Dems saw Northern labour votes come to them. However, as many of these were Conservatives who had gone to Labour it is possible that most of those people would come back to a Conservative party that was more concerned about the issues that drove them to Labour in the first case.

Cameron has started to lay out what he sees as his policy objectives:

• Making our economy more competitive
• Improving our quality of life
• Reforming our public services
• Protecting our security
• Social Action
• Addressing global poverty
  
  

I have been involved for the past six months in preparing our manifesto for the local elections next May. Getting people to move on from thinking about specific polices first and seeing how they fit broad objectives later is different from defining what the problem is and then finding the solutions. When our local manifesto is published that is what we hope will be its defining feature – it addresses the issues we face rather than just a wish list of things we think are popular.

One of the interesting aspects of the cleaner hospitals…etc approach at the General Election was that we gave the list of issues we identified were the problem but we did not talk enough about the solutions. We had the answers but we campaigned on the questions!

I gather that David is going to set up a commission on Social Justice. I am fully supportive of this approach. As I have said many time s on this blog social justice was at the heart of the conservative party ever since the mid 18th century. I will play whatever part I can in feeding into that debate.